Why Alabama Can Claim 13 National Championships - Part 1

Any college football national championship, by its format alone, can easily be debated. We saw a number in the '90s, such as the exclusion of PennState in '94 from the news services polls and the awarding of a national championship to FSU over Notre Dame in '93 (ND beat FSU earlier in the year). We have seen some in the last decade as well (USC, Auburn, etc.).The truth is that they can all be debated.In some ways, that complication adds to the lore of college football.I'm not one of those folks that is anti-playoff system, but I also don't believe a playoff is a perfect answer either. College football at the highest level is complicated and a simple playoff approach does not do justice to what many fans in the South refer to as "God's Sport."

When a person starts to look at prior national championships in college football, one should note that throughout history the guides used to determine who actually the national champion was have varied over the decades and in some cases from year to year and poll to poll. This point is most clearly demonstrated by the time frame in which the Associated Press (AP) and United Press (UP) polls were finalized. Sometimes they were finalized before the bowl games, sometimes after the bowl games. More to come on this topic of bowl games.Not to mentioned that the AP poll didn't even begin until 1936 and the UP poll started in 1950 (remember this the next time someone on ESPN only wants to recognize major wire service poll championships).A decade from now, who knows what the system or rules will be for a college football national champion.Maybe we will have a playoff or maybe a modified BCS system.Whatever it is, chances are the rules will be at least a little and maybe a lot different.

Such a future does not change or diminish a championship claimed today, just as today's view doesn't change or diminish a championship many years and decades ago.An example of such an approach is when an individual attempts to argue that a team did not deserve a national championship in a certain year because that team lost their bowl game. While that is true today, such was clearly not the case until the mid 1970s ('64 and '73 are examples for Alabama). The reality is that until the 1970s, many schools viewed bowl games as exhibition games and not part of the season.In fact, many schools (Notre Dame is a prime example) refused to participate.Thus, the final poll (AP, UPI, etc.) voting time lines for major polls of that period often occurred before the bowl games.If we used the bowl game rule, then Notre Dame couldn't claim a championship until they consistently started going to bowl games in the 1970s.